Monday, March 30, 2009

You think I'm tough? Meet my spam filter.

My spam filter makes me look like a pussycat.

Her name is Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and the desert is the Sahara of no-response.

You don't want to hang out with Priscilla.

One fast way to engage Priscilla's attentions is for your send name not to match your email name. And when it doesn't, and Priscilla consigns you to the desert, I won't save you. If I "mouse over" your email name -for example BarbaraPoelle- and what I see is that it comes from "slitherycompetitor@spam.com" I don't reel you up into the incoming mail. I let you lie there.

It's not the @spam.com that I toss you for it's the slitherycompetitor. Make sure your email name and your name are close enough I can recognize them as the same person.

You adjust this in SETTINGS. If you have no clue what I'm talking about, get some help from a colleague who understands email. Chances are you're fine, but don't assume.

18 comments:

Ok, that was a huge "duh" moment for me. Checking it out I did get the gist of what you were talking about. Big relief. Not that I've sent you any query letters or such...you just never know. Keeping the door open isn't a bad thing, ever. (Hugs)Indigo

My e-mail address is <uniquescreenname@gmail.com>. I do not have an e-mail address that says <realname@anything.com> and it would never have occurred to me to send professional mail as UniqueScreenName, because I feel that if I'm going to communicate with someone outside the blogosphere, I should be using my real name in communication.

It never occurred to me that this might land me in somebody's spam filter. Looking at my inbox, at least half the people I communicate with have similar non-real-name e-mail addresses.

my 'laughingwolf' online username is front and center [nearly] in my gmail, so folk who know me by that, know it's from me... except, it's been highjacked lately in my blogger account and friends tell me some twit is sending them spam, and worse, with my name and isp on it! GRRR

Ewww, I'm going to have to change something. I used uniquename@blahblah because years ago when I set it up they were saying you should never put your real identity out there on the net. Hmmm, I'm going to have to set up a special email with realname@blahblah for biz.

I'm actually planning on creating an email account with my name (RealName@SomewhereReputable.com) just for querying and business stuff. That seems like an even better idea now. I didn't know spam filters looked at that kind of thing.

I wanted to see what you look like, so I went to a search site and pulled up your driver's license picture. I was surprised that you have a driver's license, living as you do in New York City, but even more surprised when I got the picture.

Wow, another obstacle that never crossed my mind. Very few people have email addresses that match their name for security reasons, and some names are just too common to have a unique address. Do all agents do that? That would stink to be rejected because of technical difficulties. What if their email matches their pen name?

The domain names are what makes a difference, too. Names..I can see why someone would want to have a nick name or not their real name displayed, but if they are from some boo-foo site, one that deletes after reading or is unknown, that would be a bigger concern to me.

Can Priscilla be my wing girl when I go out on dates? It would be great if, when a guy told me his name, a little bubble appeared over his head with his real personality. "Slithery competitor" might be an apt title for some...

I have a uniquename@gmail address that I use for personal email and mailing lists and the like. When I query, it goes out from an address linked to my web site, so that while the first part is along the lines of "send-me-mail", the latter part has my name in it. I'm sure Priscilla is all right with that.

Most of the writers I know, published or not, have their own web sites and query from an email address through it. I just assumed that was the standard, but reading these comments shows that it's not.

Maybe creating a yourname@gmail.com address for queries would be a compromise for the non-web-site-owners?

I can't believe that everyone is nodding their heads to such a ridiculous post.

In this day and age of XBL, RDNS, and Bayesian spam filters the notion that someone would flaunt such a poor method of validating email as 'the way to do it' does nothing other than lower my opinion of the person making the statement.

Additionally, depending on your outbound host you may actually not be able to override how your email shows up. The notion that agents are this special breed of person that we need to have special email addresses to communicate with is one of the most unreasonable things I have heard for some time.

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I'm a literary agent in NYC. I specialize in crime fiction and narrative non-fiction (history and biography.) I'll be glad to receive a query letter from you; guidelines to help you decide if I'm looking for what you write are below.
There are several posts labelled "query pitfalls" and "annoy me" that may help you avoid some common mistakes when querying.